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Monthly Archives: May 2018

How do you build a consulting business with a view to selling it eventually? What's the secret formula to guarantee success?

In Episode 032, Jack has invited David Barnett who is an Amazon best selling author and has been working with small businesses for over 20 years and currently works with entrepreneurs around the world helping them to buy, sell, finance and manage their businesses. Based on his solid foundation and experience, David will share how one can build a consulting business with a view to selling for a profit eventually and what buyers are looking for in a consulting business?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of a Business Broker

"I decided I would become a business broker and I joined up with an international business brokerage company and the reason I chose them is because they gave me access to training and so I'm on the east coast of Canada in a province called New Brunswick and I was the first person ever in New Brunswick to be certified as a business broker and so I was able to bring a higher level of professionalism to the trade here in New Brunswick and in my business brokerage, I did that for three years. I sold 36 companies for other people and so I was very successful as a business broker. But what the story doesn't tell you is that the cash flow of that business is terrible. When I was a business broker, I was basically earning a commission from the business seller when the business was sold and even though I sold 36 companies in three years, there were three different periods, some of them up to nine months long with no closings, so imagine for nine months you're spending money on rent your office, staff advertising the budget at home and no money is coming in at the top and so it was very stressful and if you look at my photo online, you'll see that I have grey hair on the side of my head and all of this grey hair comes from that time of my life."

From a broker to a consultant

"And what I realised later is that was the market trying to speak to me. These were people who were trying to learn and it was only later after I got out of business brokerage when my mind was opened to understanding a different way that I realised that people don't necessarily want someone in the middle who takes a piece of the deal. People want guidance and advice and they're willing to pay for it. In much the same way that you go to an accountant for help with your tax forms or you go to a lawyer for help with a contract. People will pay for competent advice. And so my business today is simply based upon people coming to me to help them through the process of either buying or selling their businesses.

What are the buyers looking fro when they buy a business?

"Buyers are only looking for one thing when they buy a business. They are looking for cash flow. They want to pay money to you in order to secure a stream of revenue for themselves, and so what that stream of revenue looks like is different based on different kinds of businesses."

Why would a business owner want to sell his business?

"And so we've got poor health, we've got burnout, we've got divorced, we've got relocation and the last one was retirement. So out of the top five reasons that people ended up wanting to sell a business or needing to sell a business, only one of the five is planned for. The other 80 percent of the time, people were not planning with their business. And so that's why it's so very important when you are building your business, you need to get these things in place. Systems, processes, procedures, products in place, as soon as you can because you need to be running your business at all times as though it might go up for sale because the things that can push you to need to sell your business are sometimes things that you never expected."

Quitting your day job is a very scary decision to make because it is hard to reverse. Quitting your day job might burn bridges, your position might be filled, and you are not sure if you can ever get employment ever again. That is why you need to have a set of goals for quitting your day job, that way you have something to work towards, you know when it is time to quit, and you have a driving force pushing you to quit, and pull through on your self-made promise.

You should have goals for savings, career, income, and with legal issues. Savings might mean that you have a certain amount of money in the bank, just in case your business takes a turn and stops making money. Decide on how much money you need in the bank to support yourself for six months, at least. That is pretty easy to work towards, and to figure out. If you decide that you want $10,000 in the bank, then figure out how to save $500 or $1,000 every month, keep adding to that nest egg until you hit your goal.

Then, think about your career. It is going to look weird if there is a blank spot on your resume for 5 years or 10 years on the off chance that you have to go to a day job, or if a new job presents itself that you just can’t pass up. Think about what it will look like on your resume and maybe if you need to stay with this job for another year or two just to have the experience, or even to have the proper training to then manage your own business.

Probably the most important and obvious goal is income or cash flow. How much money would you need to have every month, not just to be happy, and not just to equal your day job – but how much money would you need to have coming in every month to justify quitting that job, It is very difficult, because what if your day job makes you $5,000 per month and then you figure out how to make your home business make $5,000 per month. Now you are making $10,000 per month, and to quit your job at this point – you are going to be cutting your income in half. That is why you have to figure out what level of income you would be happy with even with the sudden drop of losing one of your incomes.

And probably the least important are the legal goals. What kind of things will you have to worry about that you did not have to worry about at a day job, Will you need to get your own car lease, Your own health insurance, Establish a business structure, Figure out what legal issues you need to have in place when you quit your day job and get these in place as soon as possible.

Quitting your day job can be an emotional and difficult choice, but if you split that huge, big, scary choice up into small pieces – you can attack them one at a time, have a goal to build up to, and be completely sure when exactly the right time is to quit your day job.

I know that you might hate your day job, or you may realize that your day job might come obsolete pretty soon and you want to quit. It is not a good idea to drop everything and suddenly start building a business. So how do you balance your existing day job with your future business, How do you keep both of them moving forward so that eventually your business overtakes your day job and you can quit your day job and now be in business for yourself instead of someone else, Make sure not to mix the two, set time to do your business before or after the day job, and give yourself the proper motivation to eventually quit.

Never build your business while at your day job. You can never be sure what kind of monitoring software your employer had installed on the computer or on your network, and you can’t always be sure of what clause is in your contract that may or may not state that using your day job to build your business is reason to be fired. Not just that, but that your business is now owned by your day job.

It is not a good idea and the best way to be sure is just to keep your day job at your day job, and your home-business at home.

How then do you find the time to do things like set up a website, make a blog, make a product while going through this day job, What you do is schedule time to build your business before or after going to your day job. This depends on if you have a family, and if you are a morning or a night person. You might have to wake up an hour earlier to focus on your business before going to your day job. Maybe immediately after you get home from your day job you spend one hour on your business. Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night to spend one hour then to build what you have to build, but schedule certain hours or maybe just one hour per day, or maybe time on the weekend when you can make the day job hours work and when you can still see your family and still have a normal life.

Don’t mix the day job and the business, and schedule time before and after for your own personal time. Even though you might be really tempted to quit that day job immediately, hold off for a few weeks at least. The day job is very good motivation to eventually quit.

We all have bad days at the day job, we get tired of waking up early, or don’t feel like driving into work. Keep that in mind so that you are motivated to get alot done in your own business, and after you quit you will be motivated to keep doing that so that you never have to go back to your day job.

Have you wondered how to get out of the rat race as an employee to start investing in the real estate?

In Episode 031, Jack has invited Lane Kawaoka who is a civil engineer as well as a real estate investor. He currently has a 11 single-family home portfolio with experience in Seattle, Birmingham, Atlanta, Indianapolis, and PA. Lane is also co-owner of MFPE Investments LLC that currently controls 825 multifamily apartment and RV units. Lane will share how to transition from an employee to a real-estate investor, which is inspirational. The key is as long as you get laser-focused and work with the right people, you can also be a successful real estate investor.

From a Civil Engineer to a Real Estate Investor

"I did civil engineering and industrial engineering and I went to work for the man as a construction supervisor and out in the field working long hours. I work one of those jobs where it's 100% travel so I was never home all the time. And for engineers, we earn decent amount of money but nothing crazy like a doctor or lawyer. So I was able to save some money and I bought a home to live in pretty shortly after graduating from college and since I was never home I just rented it out and the rent that I was bringing in the income minus expenses was a lot of beer money right there. I have to do this again and again and again, because at that point that was the freedom, that was the way I was going to get up out of the rat race. I didn't know what I wanted to do at that time, but it was like I didn't like my job. I didn't like working for somebody else and this was the only way out at the time."

Be Laser Focused and Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome

"Just in the real estate world, you can invest in single-family homes. I wanted to fix and flip properties or want to invest in apartments or assisted living facilities or gas stations or shopping malls. Very different things under the umbrella of real estate and from what I see from the successful people, I don't try and recreate the wheel. I just follow other people's methods. This is kind of why we listen to these podcasts is the successful people aren't getting laser focused on one thing and then learning something else or finding the other people to work with the other investments."

Right People and Self-Awareness

"I think on the investor's side, all it takes is to work with the right people and part of it is self awareness. Like I said, real estate is a very forgiving asset that you're trying to hook up with people who are very knowledgeable because it may not be your area of expertise. You may not know the rental value ratios to look for. You may not know that the neighbourhoods, but you trying to work with the right people in your life partnerships in terms of, you know, allying equity so that both sides are working together for the same cause, which is to make money."

You don’t get extra points or extra money if you are working for yourself just by putting in extra time. If one person sits down and spends 30-minutes making articles, sending out auto-responders and leaves. And another person sits down for 12-hours and gets the same thing accomplished – then who is the real winner, They both got the same out-come, but one person spent half an hour of time, and one person spent 12-hours of time. You don’t want to be busy, you want to be productive. You can tell you are being productive if you are finishing what you do, if you are focusing on deliverables, and if your tasks are on course to your bigger goal.

What does it mean to finish something, It means that you have something to show for your efforts, it means that someone could look over your shoulder and see what you physically created from your efforts. That might mean that you made five forum posts instead of spending three hours on a forum. It might mean that you finished two chapters of your report, instead of outlining two chapters. Outlining is fine, but finishing is better.

You need to show what you have actually completed. What that actually delivers to you. That means that if you finished two chapters of your report, did those make you any money, Did you take those two chapters and release the newer version of your report, If you wrote an article, did you submit it, And, did that give you traffic and did that get you sales, Then you now have a deliverable based on what you created.

It’s one thing to write more of a blog post, but what if you published it or scheduled it so that it is now out there. No matter what tasks you complete, you need to make sure that this is all in line with your bigger picture. It doesn’t make sense to be marketing in one niche, but then write articles in a different niche. Or, to send an email with one topic but tomorrow ask people to buy a product about a completely different topic.

That is what you need to do to make sure you are productive, and not just busy. That you are finishing what you start, that you think about what deliverables you are making, and that your tasks are on course to the bigger picture.

In case you wonder why there had been no Celebration Sunday over the last two weekends, it’s only because I was out of town in two consecutive weeks. I spent the first weekend in Ho Chi Minh City to assist my teacher, Blair Singer, in the Sales Explosion Program in the capacity of the Program Director. The group of 500 did great and in one of our hallmark exercises, this group did a total sales of USD20 million in just over 10 minutes, breaking all records of the previous Sales Explosion Program. As far as I recall, the last record was in Sau Paulo, Brazil where the participants did a total sales of USD9.7 million in just over 10 minutes. If this sounds a scam or skeptical to you, I can understand. As Blair said, it’s because your capacity to grow is limited by your own self-concept. If you haven’t experienced such results before, you have every right to say “I don’t believe this!” Isn’t interesting that human brains work this way?

Then last week I was in Yangon, Myanmar as the Lead Trainer of a new program called “Master Your Stage”.

One thing that made me very proud and I would like to take this opportunity to celebrate with you (and that means me!) is that our graduates paid premium tuition to join this program. Based on the current statistics I have for Myanmar, a person has to invest 4 to 5 months of his average monthly salary in order to join this program. So, in Singapore standard, this program is equivalent to USD15,000 for 3 days of immersion and experiential learning. How many of you at this point would say that “it’s totally crazy and not possible”? This was the issue with my event organizer in Yangon, Myanmar two months before the launch of the program. “There is no way people would invest so much money in a 3-day program!”, my event organizer said. Two months later, my event organizer thanked me for helping them “break this limiting belief” and you know what? Season 2 is already 50% sold out in Quarter 4, 2018. And we are going to raise our tuition fee again due to the popular demand for this program.

Master Your Stage has also helped me to confirm that one would pay when they see the value of the program exceeds the investment the person has to fork out. As my mentor, Marshall Thurber, teacher of Robert Kiyosaki, T Harv. Eker and Blair Singer, said all businesses are clients intimacy businesses. Don’t focus on the price because it is irrelevant. What’s the value proposition of what you plan to do? Is this proposition something the market truly wants?

Finally, a lot of people from all over the world who saw what people post online about Master Your Stage asked what kind of program it is. D. Cavanagh and M. Carson, who are two of my influencers in the speaker training industry, asked me whether it is a speaker’s training. I said “Nope! MYS is only a personal development program and I will continue saying this because it is indeed a PD program.”

Perhaps it is my gift because, over the years, I have created tens or hundreds of programs for myself and for other people, I spent only 10 minutes to come up with the program. Again, similar to what I said about the results of the people did in Blair’s Sales Explosion Program, you have every right to question the validity of what I said and you know what? I am not going to waste my time to explain to you as I have already proven to the world that MYS has been created and Season 1 has been successfully completed lastweek. Results never lie, make sense?

So what if you say to yourself that you don’t have such a gift, can you do something about it? My answer is “you don’t know what you don’t know.” The good news is that you can always model from someone who has done this and is willing to share with you his lifework. Of course, there will be a price to pay as nothing is free in the world. Free advice is equivalent to criminal exchange if you are familiar with Blair Singer’s teaching.

If you are still stuck in the “day job” mentality, you might be thinking about how many hours a day you need to be putting into your own life or your own business to make sure that you keep making progress every single day. That is the wrong way of thinking and that is the wrong thing to be asking, because being busy does not mean you are being productive.

If you sit at your computer for 8-hours a day and constantly check your email, check your twitter, check Facebook, check forums, and never get anything accomplished – then you are busy. You are spending all this time at the computer wasting time, getting nothing done, having nothing to show for it.

Most people I know who work an 8-hour per day “day job” can tell me that they only put in about 15-minutes of productivity every single day. Sure you get paid for 8-hours, but you take bathroom breaks, you check email, get coffee, you spend time researching or reading, and really as far as getting things completed and showing what progress you have made. There is only about 15-minutes every day put into it.

Luckily, when you are in business for yourself – you are not stuck at a “day job”, you are not stuck with a boss and you can get off the computer to take breaks to make yourself more productive when you come back. Think of your computer as a “hot-seat”, you don’t use it for checking email all the time and you have most windows closed. You sit down at the computer, you get whatever task finished and as soon as that’s done, you get off the computer and get to something else – walk the dog, take a walk, wash the dishes, vacuum the house, go to the store, something that does not involve TV or the computer. That way you can have some downtime, relax and recharge your batteries and subconsciously resolve many of the problems you would have had beating your head against the wall while you were on the computer.

Instead of thinking about how many hours per day you need to work, think about what tasks you should and should not be focusing on and get in the habit of using your computer as a “hot-seat.” Sit down, do it, then leave.

In Episode 030, Jack has invited Steve Clayton who is a business coach and a producer of large events to share how he turned his passion about being a DJ, into his business, being an in-demand event producer. He also shared few lessons on his entrepreneur journey and his secret sauce to his entrepreneurship success.

Steve started the Neon Run, self-producing events all across the country and in Canada in 2012. The Neon Run boasts more than 12,000 participants per race in over 10 cities nationwide and in Canada. In 2015, Steve took on the then 1-year old Chalice Festival, and in over the span of just 4 years, helped Chalice to increase from 8,000 attendees to approximately 40,000. Steve manages a $5 million dollar budget and books headline talents such as Wu Tang Clan, Migos, and Ice Cube just to name a few.

Today, Steve continues to produce major events and has spent years counselling, guiding and directing DJs to pursue meaningful work and quality life by helping them to grow their business to its fullest potential. He also just released a new book and coaching program designed to give DJs a blueprint in the “how-to’s” of growing their DJ business.

Of all businesses, what DJ Business?

"Why not? I mean you get pay for party. I mean what is better than that in the world and you know making money and getting paid to entertain people at a social gathering. I mean it was a mixture of my love for music and my desire to be an entrepreneur and my passion for the lifestyle that I can design and the freedom that will create from that. That was the kind of the kindling that started a fire."

What challenge did Steve face in his early career?

"I was going to leave the safety and security and comfort of full time job which I was a teacher, but it wasn't for me and that wasn't my passion. And leaving that steady paycheck that health insurance benefits and retirement and having two kids, a wife and a mortgage and car payments and leaving all that behind and saying, "Hey, I'm going to take this jump into just going full time with what I believe in, what I know is going to be successful." That was definitely a challenging point in my life."

Difference between goals and objectives

"The goal is subjective destination but it can't be quantified whereas objectives are mile markers along my journey to my goal. So objectives are objectively quantifiable. And so to me objectives are those destinations that you are achieving. Yes, I've got there. Now, on to the next one.

Two things to watch out for before starting a business

"So I think the other two points are what they have to analyse the risk reward factor strategically and surround yourself with people who are more successful than you in certain aspects of your business."

There are probably hundreds or thousands of different software programs that try to help you try to manage your life, give you more free time, and make you more productive. The problem is many of these software programs box you in and suck up all your time while you are managing the different things you get done.

I am very much against complicated time-management systems where you have to draw tables, list lots of tasks, and keep everything in a spreadsheet or in a software program. Instead of using a software program or a complicated system, just use four (4) daily tasks and a countdown timer.

Four daily tasks means that today you pick four simple things to do. That might be write a blog post, send an auto-responder message, get one new affiliate partner, and edit sales letter for 30-minutes. Just have four simple things, four tasks – not a to-do list, but tasks, where each of those items can be completed in one single sitting at the computer.

To make sure you complete these tasks in a timely fashion, use a countdown timer. If you are a Windows user, I use a program called Cool-Timer that will countdown or count up depending on what you want to do. If you wanted to spend 30-minutes changing around your blog, then set that timer to 30-minutes, let it countdown, and as soon as it hits zero, then you stop.

If you are not comfortable with a computer program to time you, or you don’t have a Windows computer – you can use a kitchen timer, or even use the countdown timer on your phone.

Have four things to do, and time everything you do with a countdown timer to make sure you finish it all. Don’t waste time managing the system or tracking your progress or analyzing your progress, just have four things to do every day and time those tasks so you get them completed on time.